Why Indian roads will take decades to be ready for self-driving cars

Although India can become a hub for technology development, car manufacturers do not think the country’s roads will be ready to take autonomous vehicles for a few decades, if not more.Hari Pulakkat | ET Bureau | April 28, 2016, 09:45 IST

For Nalin Gupta and his friends, the transition from IIT Kharagpur to the Silicon Valley was as easy as learning to drive.

As students of IIT, they had done some research on autonomous vehicles and founded a robotics research group there.

The three friends did not want to give up their passion even after leaving the institution. India did not have a market for autonomous cars, but they found nourishment elsewhere.

They got seed money from the accelerator Y Combinator, and moved to the Valley last year to found Auro Robotics. Last week, they raised $2 million from a set of investors there.

Gupta, Jit Ray Chowdhury and Srinivas Reddy are aiming at a market shunned by Google and Tesla, the two companies leading the race to build autonomous cars: transport in private campuses. Auro Robotics is running a pilot trial with a small autonomous golf cart at Santa Clara University, and will be ready to hit the market next year. “It is a simple problem,” says Gupta. “Campuses have a controlled environment.”

Vehicles there have low speeds and governments do not regulate traffic in private campuses. The market, however, is big enough for a startup to develop a business. University campuses, theme parks, and retirement communities need such vehicles.

After private campuses, Auro Robotics would look at another market that big companies avoid: last and first mile transport in big cities. It is a harder problem than autonomous carts in private campuses, and the company is far from solving it. It is difficult even for the larger companies, according to many experts in the industry.

Once out on the public streets, an autonomous vehicle has to deal with the chaos that human beings create. Only human beings understand the chaos of public streets, at least at current levels of technology.

Race to the Future

Inside automobile companies, autonomous vehicles form one of their key futuristic projects. Different companies have announced different goals publicly, but privately they admit that fully autonomous vehicles are a long way in the future. Some of them have also announced a path to full autonomy, with at least two significant milestones on the way.

As many industry observers see it, cars will gradually acquire technologies to assist drivers on key functions, and move smoothly over a decade to full autonomy. However, gradual acquisition of technologies may not result in a fully autonomous vehicle in the future. “It is a quantum jump,” says Manu Saale, managing director of the Mercedes-Benz R&D centre in Bengaluru. “It is not an organic evolution.”

The Mercedes-Benz R&D centre has grown rapidly over the years, with more than 3,000 people now developing technologies for a range of problems, including autonomous driving. With regulations - or lack of them - preventing testing on Indian roads, ideas within Mercedes-Benz R&D centre are being tested on European roads.

Other R&D centres in Bengaluru also work on technologies for autonomous vehicles. Continental Automotive R&D centre, for example, works with its counterparts in other countries to develop now common technologies like parking assist, remote garage parking, and other technologies supposed to be part of highly automated vehicles in the future. Texas Instruments has been part of a company programme to develop chips that are becoming part of several autonomous driving technologies.

Although there is a big difference in the technologies behind a fully autonomous vehicle and a highly autonomous vehicle, consumers over the next decade will feel that cars are moving towards autonomy gradually, as on-board computers take over human functions one by one. Many automotive companies like Continental have chartered a path over the next decade: partially automated, highly automated and fully automated.

Roads in developed countries now have a large number of partially automated vehicles, and highly automated vehicles will soon join them. Even Indian roads could see vehicles with some partial automation, but anything more would need to wait for better infrastructure and regulation.

For example, driver assistance technologies have been gradually seeping into cars in developed markets. Adaptive cruise control lets a car on the highway to slow down or speed up depending on the speed of the car in front. Advanced versions of this feature will take into account the car behind as well, or stop the car when there is a traffic jam ahead.

Last year, Continental demonstrated stop and go feature in slow-moving traffic, automatic steering, and manoeuvring around obstructions like people cutting down a tree. Lane departure warning systems are now common in many cars in Europe and the US, warning drivers when the cars drifts away from its lanes. Other common features include night vision, blind spot detection, drowsiness monitoring system and so on.

Not every feature has a name to it. In some advanced cars like Mercedes or BMW, sometimes even in India, the headlights can move in anticipation of a manoeuvre like turning or climbing a hill, giving the driver a glimpse of where the car is heading.

All of these technologies form part of a partially automated vehicle. A highly automated vehicle is a significant step forward, and will have at least 50% of a car’s functions automated. Some versions of such vehicles have already been demonstrated. Observers expect the stop and go feature to be part of some cars this year, assisting the driver to automatically stop and move in slow moving traffic. Also expected soon are systems that monitor a driver’s alertness and those that can help the car steer at high speeds.

A highly automated vehicle has several cameras, short and long range radars, different kinds of sensors, and a high amount of on-board intelligence to process the information from several sources. The path towards high levels of automation might hit some temporary roadblocks, especially because of concerns about health impacts of widespread use of radars.

Most observers think that highly automated vehicles will be common by 2020 in developed markets. From then onwards, cars will keep acquiring more and more functions, often without drivers even noticing their presence. But a fully automated vehicle is still at least a decade away, according to many observers, except in highly controlled environments.

From a technology point of view, there is no continuum from high automation to full automation. It is also hard for society to accept a fully autonomous vehicle on the road. “Companies have cars that are fully autonomous,” says Santhosh Kumar, managing director of Texas Instruments in India. “The question is, who is production ready?”

Getting a production-ready car needs clear regulations. Governments in developed markets have been examining the idea of autonomous vehicles for some time, but there is no consensus on what should be done. A few US states have some form of regulation on autonomous vehicles. Early this year, the US transportation secretary published guidelines on automated vehicles, which accepts that automated vehicles are technologically feasible on US roads in the future. Uniform regulation, however, could take some time.

“A lot of the delay in developing fully autonomous vehicles has to do with regulation,” says Raghav Gulur, head of the Continental R&D centre in Bengaluru.

Infrastructure Worries

In spite of aggressive claims by Tesla, industry veterans expect fully autonomous vehicles to appear only by 2025 or later, although some European countries have infrastructure close to what is needed for fully autonomous vehicles.

Companies have long expected human-driven cars to coexist with autonomous vehicles, but this hybrid nature is a big challenge for auto companies. Although India can become a hub for technology development, car manufacturers do not think the country’s roads will be ready to take autonomous vehicles for a few decades, if not more.

Advanced technologies have low penetration in the country. A preliminary study, not yet fully complete, by the market research firm Markets and Markets found that brake assist and park assist have penetrated the Indian car market only 3% and 5% respectively. Tyre Pressure Monitoring Systems, which could become mandatory sometime in the near future, have a penetration of only 2.7%.

Advanced technologies penetrate price-sensitive markets like India only slowly. The infrastructure of Indian roads is far from ready to accommodate even highly automated driving. But will this twenty-first century technology force Indian drivers and regulators to change faster than they want to?